Zippy The Pinhead - Origin

Origin

Zippy made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix #1 in March 1971. The strip began in The Berkeley Barb in 1976 and was syndicated nationally soon after, originally as a weekly strip. In a 2008 interview with Alex Dueben, Griffith recalled how it all began:

I first saw the 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks in 1963 at a screening at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where I was attending art school. I was fascinated by the pinheads in the introductory scene and asked the projectionist (who I knew) if he could slow down the film so I could hear what they were saying better. He did and I loved the poetic, random dialog. Little did I know that Zippy was being planted in my fevered brain. Later, in San Francisco in 1970, I was asked to contribute a few pages to Real Pulp Comics #1, edited by cartoonist Roger Brand. His only guideline was to say "Maybe do some kind of love story, but with really weird people." I never imagined I'd still be putting words into Zippy's fast-moving mouth some 38 years later.

Zippy has a cult following, but some other readers remain confused, prompting the official Zippy website to feature a tutorial on understanding the strip. When William Randolph Hearst III took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1985, he offered Griffith an opportunity to do Zippy as a daily strip. Several months later it was picked up for worldwide daily distribution by King Features Syndicate in 1986. The Sunday Zippy debuted in 1990. When the San Francisco Chronicle canceled Zippy briefly in 2002, the newspaper received thousands of letters of protest, including one from Robert Crumb, who called Zippy "by far the very best daily comic strip that exists in America." The Chronicle quickly restored the strip but dropped it again in 2004, leading to more protests as well as grateful letters from non-fans. The strip continues to be syndicated in many newspapers but often ranks at or near the bottom of reader polls.

The strip is unique among syndicated multi-panel dailies for its characteristics of literary nonsense, including a near-absence of either straightforward gags or continuous narrative, and for its unusually intricate artwork, which is reminiscent of the style of Griffith's 1970s underground comics.

The Zippy website allows readers to scroll through thousands of Zippy daily and Sunday strips. A "Strip Search" feature also allows search by title, date or key word(s).